Communist Workers Group (CWG-USA)

The Egyptian Revolution: The electoral road to imperialist “stabilization” vs. the road to workers power!

 We were delighted to see footage telecast Sunday (7/15/12) of  Hillary Clinton’s Cairo motorcade being pelted with tomatoes and shoes.  We were told she shook hands with the elected President, the Muslim Brotherhood candidate M. Morsi, but this was not shown.  Today we did see a photo of her shaking hands with Field Marshall Hussein Tantawi, head of the Supreme Council of the Armed forces (hereafter the SCAF.)  We watch what each of these sorry figures do because we are focused on the two questions of power: who has it now and how does the working class go about seizing and keeping it (?)  We have some altogether different answers to those two questions than what thoughtful workers have come to expect from various erstwhile revolutionary socialists.

So let’s look at the Egypt of Mid-July, 2012 in the aftermath of the two rounds of bourgeois parliamentarism that have the Anglo-American imperialists soaking their shirt fronts for joy. These now believe their local partners/dependents have put over the stabilization of bourgeois rule.  No supposition is involved on their part.  Morsi has said it has been done, both to the Egyptian press and to the Saudi government. Morsi and Clinton particularly feel that what remains to be done to consolidate their triumph over the masses is to foist a more opaque, “constitutional” civilian rule upon them.  This will require that the Army (specifically Tantawi and the SCAF) appear to cede more power to an elected parliament that has so far (7/15) met in defiance of the Supreme Court (army controlled) exactly once and for five minutes. Clinton says the U.S.A. is not in Egypt to pick the winners. Not much it isn’t!

In Washington’s preferred scheme, the Army and the Muslim Brotherhood will have to compete with favors for the parliamentarians’ votes.  Ms. Clinton is now explaining the details.  This is a plan for a weak regime of a very usual Middle East type.  This plan is for a regime that will interfere very little with penetrations of the Egyptian market by international capital, will interfere with Israel not at all in practice, and will not export the February, 2011 revolution to any of its neighbors, no matter how much Morsi also swears to uphold “the ideals of Tahrir Square.”

With the grins of a comic opera buffoon, Morsi has spent two weeks promising all of this. For the international press the big question is how much the SCAF will permit him to do beyond the theatrical in what the policy wonks see as a done deal.

The Various Erstwhile Revolutionary Socialists: Three Excuses

For different reasons, each of our main “Trotskyist” opponents take elements and even most of the above description as the finished outcome, as contemporary Egypt A to Z.  We will endeavor here to put spotlights on their errors and the “theory” behind them.  “Theory” in these quotes because the ultimate sources of these errors is the rejection of dialectics and the mentality of the radicalized petty bourgeoisie in the metropolises, posing as working class political consciousness.  A reactionary reformism in the service of imperialism and two varieties of aberrant “Cannonism“[1] figure here. Each has nothing to offer — or worse — to the Egyptian and Middle Eastern working class.

First let’s look at the role and the historical modus operandi of the Cliffite international current. For our purposes here we are looking at the “mothership” S.W.P. (U.K.,) the sometimes slightly estranged International Socialist Organization (I.S.O.) in the U.S., and the Egyptian Revolutionary Socialists (R.S.) of Egypt.  Each is an example of the Tony Cliff world view of the former U.S.S.R. and each of the degenerate workers states as “state capitalist.”  This was the view of their ultimate progenitor, Max Schachtman, whose “Workers Party” Leon Trotsky described as a reactionary reformist tendency (also as a “counterrevolutionary reformist tendency.”)  They sport Trotsky’s picture while serving imperialism, mostly without the understanding of the membership.  They have done this uninterruptedly since 1940, when they supported the Mannerheim dictatorship of Finland against the U.S.S.R. Sometimes the inevitable advance of workers’ consciousness wrecks this scheme and results in healthy splits.  In recent times the wonderful split of the majority of the I.S.O. Zimbabwe from Cliffism and its plan to bury the comrades in the popular front, and the resulting new Revolutionary Workers Group is an example to the revolutionary class the world over.

Reactionary reformism is the form to which the RS and their American co-thinkers, the ISO hew to be true, with their call to “Defeat The Right!” with a vote for the Muslim Brotherhood, (M.B.) as instructed from the S.W.P. (U.K.) mother ship.  They motivated the vote for M. Morsi much in the same way as Clinton does, i.e., that the outcome would be “democracy.” For Clinton that’s obviously bourgeois democracy. Our “3rd Campers” don’t mention whose democracy they think it is. Illusions in “classless” democracy and who spreads them could be the subject for a book length treatment.  “Defeat the Right!” they call and back the Muslim Brotherhood –a stark and unambiguous call for class collaboration and betrayal of the working class.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s original class base was the Suez Canal Company (i.e., U.K. capital,) and later the landlord class of the rural villages; villages little changed since the middle ages. The M.B. was founded in 1928 by Hassan al-Bannah and was instantly recognized by the Suez Canal Company as the antidote and political counterforce to Arab nationalism.  The company built al-Bannah his first mosque!  Naturally enough, as often as the M.B. sought over the years to pick the winning side, and while also building their own secret paramilitary force, it frequently became the focus of Nasserite repressions.  This makes them “ex-political prisoners,” and ipso facto leftists of convenience for the Cliffite world view.

For Cliffism the socialist revolution is never the task facing the working class in the near term and advances on the revolutionary road are also to be eschewed.  Even their blockade (really just a picket) of the Portuguese parliament in November, 1975 gave just enough of a whiff of a putsch to cause German Social Democracy to send their Portuguese Socialist Party co-thinkers a planeload of cash to buy some troops with, finally ending the crisis of the bourgeois state.  The Cliffite game works like this: workers are taken in by their economist practice; where the trade union bureaucrats ARE challenged, it is over “union democracy,” otherwise they are never really fought except over an occasional opportune pie card post. The pro-imperialist politics of the bureaucracy are also never fought, and during the anticommunist witch hunt in the U.S. the Schachtman/Cliffites were in the business of building anticommunist unions.

No surprise, then, when on the second day of the Tahrir Square uprising the new, mass, Independent Trade Union Federation (EFITU) came out and declared its existence after years of underground illegality, the English-speaking representatives of the RS appeared all over the left blogosphere and said what were needed now were unions (!!!)  All alone, or maybe it just seemed so, we of the Liaison Committee of Communists howled that what were needed were WORKERS COUNCILS, WORKERS MILITIA AND A REVOLUTIONARY PARTY to build an indefinite duration general strike to confound and overthrow the capitalist regime.  Ask yourself why these workers councils have not come to be.  Then ask yourself what revolutionary workers should call for in their absence, after all that has happened (to exclude you from power!)  We’ll give you our answer further down.

The #2 Excuse for Revolutionary Socialism: the International Spartacist Tendency (I.S.T.)

For the I.S.T. and their mothership, the Spartacist League U.S.A., “…there was no revolution,” they tell you with emphasis, but only “…the nationalist celebration” of February 2011 that resulted in the downfall of Mubarak.  For them the “Arab Spring” does not exist and didn’t last year.  Whatever it was did not exist as an Arab phenomenon either, let alone signal a resumption of the Arab revolution, national-democratic or otherwise.  For the Spartacists the main point isn’t even that as yet the working class has not entered the contest for power in its own name.  Rather, for them the main conclusion has to be that without a vote by the worker masses for the official Communist Party blessed by Stalin, no road out of the social impasse is to be found.  And without this vote, making room miraculously for the rise of their own politics crafted in the supremely developed U.S.A., the stabilization of the rule of the bourgeoisie will have been completed by the electoral theatrical of June, 2012, and the uprising they call the “…nationalist celebration….” IS OVER.

“…(T)here was no revolution…,” and “…the nationalist celebration…” is “over.”  What hand writes like this when witnessing events such as we have all seen?  Not the ‘heavy hand of history,’ certainly, with its enlightening economics.  This writing resembles the begrudging hand of dead bourgeois historians who concealed their racism successfully but did not live so long that they would also have to deny it.   So it is to one of the leaderships devoted to one of the visions of cold war “Cannonist” American exceptionalist, monolithic party-building that the Egyptian workers’ leaders must turn if they are ever to discover what their programmatic needs are.  Without this gift from New York (IST HQ) the Egyptian revolutionaries will go no place.  This is the taste they leave.

We (revolutionary workers) say no thanks.  We have watched the democratic aspirations of the masses run headlong into the fortified political positions of the local and imperialist bourgeoisies and their two main reactionary political vehicles.  Right this minute the class struggle is seething and bubbling in all the main cities, even as the leading workers are in disarray before the configurations of these fortified positions, such as the privatizing laws dating from the Nazif years so beloved of the I.M.F., the “Law 96” that reversed the Nasser-era land reforms and the usury of the state banks which make the life of sharecropper agriculture nearly a modern slavery, properly so called. These are still with us among many, many institutionalized injustices.

These are the regulation features of the epoch of imperialist decay, even in an Egypt that can design and build its own jet engines and ballistic missiles.  Response to oppression in the form of a transitional program is not an unfathomable unknown for those in the lesser-developed world; rather it is the legacy of all preceding generations of the modern international working class.

No more than the Tunisian, the Bahraini, the  Libyan, or the Egyptian working class is not now and will not become the playthings of the C.I.A., either.  Worse than official Spartacism, many in their orbit and other Revolutionary Tendency-derived sectarians are nowadays attributing such great world manipulative powers to Anglo-Saxon white men of the Arlington, Virginia spy bureaucracy as to read like Kipling in grotesque!  Right now these third-worldists, the many “true” Robertsonians  and factions of  Healyites, are making a Marxist saint of anti-imperialism out of Assad, much as they found workers state credentials all of a sudden for the Libya of Qadaffi’s green book last year.  Even Occupy anarchists, no ace theoreticians of internationalism, are ‘onto’ what they describe as “kneejerk anti-imperialism.”  The official Spartacism held that the international working class had no side to choose in Libya, i.e., in something else that didn’t happen or is in any case “over.”

Well we will tell some and right here too that this is not the 1950s, either of C.I.A. coups or of Cannon’s “Speeches to the Party.”  The Permanent Revolution, never entirely off the historical agenda in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is staring, unblinking at the most advanced workers, in Egypt and across the region.  Since the ’50s the Nasserite bourgeoisie has built large scale industry and a military-industrial complex where before there was mostly sand.  There is now an Egyptian industrial working class of a size and social weight to dwarf the one existing in 1905-17 Russia.  Where have they suffered a historic defeat?  Wherefore, except in the Bolivarian logic of some latterday Monad Press[2] book, is this cynicism about the possibilities of our revolutionary social class?

In the next historical conjuncture bourgeois parliamentarianism in the MENA will disappoint and betray and fail to deliver for all but the imperialists and their Zionist muscle.  Only the socialist revolution can deliver democracy.  Only socialist revolution can refute forever the false ideas that history is over and that poverty is the unique product of nature.  To do this requires delivering democracy and surpassing it through the power and acts of the workers state, where the masses, led by the workers, live the Occupy slogan and “vote every day.”

The Socialist Workers Party (Barnes): Dead Wood Standing

The S.W.P. (Barnes) of the United States offers the other aberrant “Cannonism” application to the Egypt of July, 2012. They simply note that struggles of the workers and peasants are continuing after the Morsi election and list some of them. This ‘journalism’ is relatively new, but it does correspond to the old-time SWP “platonic internationalism.” The more the Barnes Clique’s uncritical trajectory toward Castroism and Bolivarianism require a diminishing of Trotsky, the more these “Trotskyists” (in the minds of some) pump up Cannon, particularly the Cannon of the 1950s and early ’60s.

Actual internationalism was never the SWP’s strongest suit. Under Cannon’s leadership the International Centre of the Fourth International was closed down almost before Trotsky’s body was cool.  But soon enough in a few years bigger trouble loomed, ultimately resulting in a revisionist, “stagist” theory of socialist revolution, albeit disguised. Cannon first put up a fight against the “platonic internationalism” of Pablo and then surrendered to it once his Cochranite antagonists were gone and the Vern-Ryan critics were disciplined into silence.  A “Workers and Farmers Government” document by Bob Chester was adopted to explain (in 1954!) how the social overturn in China had come about.  The logic of the miseducation contained in this document is responsible for the undialectical world views of groups as diverse as the many spin offs of the IST and Socialist Action, and explains how they had no idea what was happening when capitalist restorations caught them unawares and unprepared.  This document will doubtless serve the Barnes clique well in the coming years as they have to make excuses for the “21st Century Socialism” of those they run with internationally.

In the case of the Arab revolution, the SWP (Barnes) got burnt once before, in the late ’60s when they were first crowding out the generation who had selected them for leadership.  Their big “Victory to the Arab Revolution!” posters were a hit on college campuses, but subjected the party to a great deal of COINTELPRO (FBI) surveillance and snooping, not to mention attentions of  other intelligence agents, including illegal but Rockefeller sponsored activities of the Shah of Iran’s secret police, the SAVAK. Not just momentarily, either, but over the course of at least fifteen years.  The pacifistic Barnes leadership group had had it with the Arab revolution by the time they were in headlong retreat from the theory of Permanent Revolution.

We think the SWP will forget the Arab Revolution this time, or any reference to a prospective socialist revolution in Egypt.  Their internationalism will consist of “news” only until or unless a new tack is required by the regimes they cheerlead for. To please the restorationists of the “21st Century Socialism” bloc (now including Chinese imperialism,) any “program” they offer the Egyptian working class will have to be as ‘reactionary reformist’ as any offering of the Cliffites.

The Revolutionary Road Ahead

Call as we will for the workers to establish their councils, to proclaim their class independence, to form up their own self defense guards and prepare the indefinite general strike against the SCAF, the imperialist overlords and the bourgeois forces of the MB, the masses move at their own pace.  Crying louder or even putting our program in bold print will do little to nothing to help the masses overcome their illusions in parliamentarism.

The R.S.  in their capitulation to the backwardness of the masses (by NO MEANS everyone![3]) joined forces with the MB in elections the revolutionary workers would have done best to boycott. The RS rejected the Leninist-Trotskyist method of applying the tactic of critical support to workers and bourgeois-workers parties.  Supporting the MB, an open theocratic capitalist party, puts the Cliffites in the camp of the class enemy.  Critical support was originated by the Bolsheviks as a tactic to allow the communist workers to approach the left moving rank and file of the reformist and centrist “socialists.” The support for the candidates of the reformists was explained like this; “like a rope supports a hanging man.” (Lenin) Yes the communists offer critical support of just enough rope for the reformists to hang themselves.  That rope is offered in the form of the action program of the proletariat.  But the RS abandons the proletarian program and offers up the Egyptian working class to the imperialists’ stooges in the same way that the American CP has for decades, skewering the working class and roasting us over the paralyzing flames of pragmatic capitalist lesser-evilism. The SWP (UK) like the CP (USA) promotes the popular front between classes against the so-called “greater enemy.”  Yet in so doing they bind the workers to a wing of the ruling class whose class program always dominates the popular front or electoral bloc.

The pragmatism of the RS told them they had no choice but to support the lesser evil.  Where is the workers party, where is the revolutionary party for which to vote?  There is no choice.  The blinders they apply not only to themselves but to the class!  Instead of proclaiming the elections to be a class- biased fraud that offers the workers no representation they join in the charade.

In contradistinction to all the above described misleadership, the historical revolutionary Marxist program says to the workers:

1)     The elections offer only candidates of various wings of the bourgeoisie.  The SCAF have served the imperialists for decades while enriching themselves.  The MB has been a tool of Anglo imperialism since its inception and will make peace with imperialism and Zionism, they will keep the peasant masses in sharecropping servitude, they will use the military against the workers movement, they may concede minor reforms to quiet the masses yet they will allow the SCAF to maintain its crony capitalist superstructure and above all the profits/ privilege they rake off for themselves and the I.M.F.

2)     The crisis of capitalism, the agricultural crisis, the limits on the Arab national revolution, the crisis of unemployment and poverty can only be addressed by a workers government created by councils of workers representatives, administering a socialist program on behalf of the working class.

3)     Yet today we do not have workers councils, today the workers still hope the elections offer a road out of the crisis and are not convinced of the necessity of socialism.  To these workers we say: “we too defend our democratic right to the franchise– hundreds/thousands have died for it!– therefore we demand the right to vote for a program that represents the poor, the workers and the landless farmers!  Today only the bosses and landlords’ political parties send politicians to the parliament and there is no possibility for the working class and poor to be represented. Even the promised new constitution is being blocked at every turn by the SCAF. To assure our classes’ right to a franchise we propose our unions and popular organizations convene of a revolutionary constituent assembly (RCA) made up of workers representatives, students and youth 16 yrs. and up, sharecroppers representatives, small family farmers and shopkeepers, the representatives of the neighborhood committees of revolutionary fighters who defended the revolution.

4)     In the RCA we advance the proletarian program to provide: Jobs, Land, Bread!

5)     Reverse the privatization drive of the Washington Consensus!  Establish massive public works programs to raise the country out of poverty, provide clean water to the farmers and consumers, provide safe working conditions, build infrastructure for a sustainable future society.

6)     Create “Jobs for All” by enacting 30 hours work for 40 hours pay!  Enforce a sliding scale of wages and price controls. Guarantee minimum income.  Provide Free Secular Education for all! Provide Free Quality Healthcare!

7)     Open the books of SCAF, the imperialists and all companies which claim they can not comply!  Nationalize industry, energy, distribution, finance capital and imperialist capital resources without indemnification and put the resources under workers planning and self-management!

8)     Revive the agrarian reform! Land to the tiller! End the slavery of sharecropping! Seize plantations and imperialist landholdings!  Acquire cheap credit to form up successful collective agricultural enterprises to win the small farmer to collectivism. For clean water treatment projects! If the banks will not extend credit they must be nationalized without compensation to the big shareholders and run by the workers who will assure adequate capital for struggling enterprises, public works and the small family and landless farmers.

9)     Our freedom cannot be won within the confines of our national boundaries!  Imperialism maintains powerful regimes across MENA and the entire continent to keep the workers and peasants oppressed while our mineral, agricultural wealth and our daily sweat are turned into profits on stock markets from New York, London, Brussels, and Frankfurt, to Hong Kong, Singapore and Beijing. Therefore our liberation is dependent on and interconnected with the victory of the working masses internationally over imperialism’s lackeys & stooges. Our revolution must commit itself to the victory of the Palestinian revolution, the defeat of Zionism, theocracy and all vestiges of feudalism, monarchy, patriarchy and Sharia law!

10)   The revolutionary constituent assembly can provide an audience for these ideas but will quickly come up against the contradictions posed by the drive towards class independence on the part of the workers and the counter-revolution of the national bourgeoisie and imperialism. The pull toward bourgeois democracy generally on the part of the middle classes, the liberal intelligentsia  and its class base, the petty bourgeois and professional managerial layers whose frustration with the crony capitalism of the SCAF drove them toward the revolution in the first place, and whose aspirations are frustrated by the dead end solutions of the capitalists, will split the toiling petty proprietor layers from the privileged with their dreams of coupon clipping.  As these contradictions become clear in the sessions of the RCA, the struggle for working class political independence, the formation of workers councils, the formation of rank and file soldiers unions, the creation of workers militias and a workers government will become concrete, reasonable and completely comprehensible tasks.   Yet even as the workers uncover these truths the truth alone will not accomplish the defeat of imperialism!

The RCA is the most advanced bourgeois democracy that can exist for even a moment in contradiction with an inevitable bourgeois counter-revolution. This poses immediately going beyond bourgeois democracy to workers power based on workers, soldiers, farmers councils, workers militias and a workers government composed of their recallable working delegates who will work and serve for wages only.

11)   The task of bringing the program of the workers government to the masses as well as presenting the historical pitfalls, and theoretical bases for overcoming them falls to the organized vanguard.  Yet to be established, the Egyptian revolutionary workers party, based on the theoretical gains, strategy and tactics of the first four congresses of the Third International and the method of the 1938 Transitional Program of the Fourth International is an essential missing component for the victory of the Egyptian revolution.  The formation of such a party is the foremost task for all internationalist workers!

CWG (USA)

July 19, 2012